George Clooney Covers ESQUIRE’s October-November Issue

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George Clooney is having a career for the ages. He has two adorable kids, a brilliant and beautiful wife, plenty of money, and still has his hair. He enjoys power and influence and is loved by millions, and for this cover story he’s relaxing at his gorgeous Italian lake house with ESQUIRE’s Ryan D’Agostino. “What’s Eating George Clooney?” is on Esquire.com now and will be in the October-November issue, available by October 14 everywhere magazines are sold.

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On Good Night, and Good Luck, the play he cowrote and starred in on Broadway—based on the 2005 film he cowrote and directed: “I was really nervous, as an actor, which I hadn’t been in a long time,” he says. Nervous in a good way? “Yes and no. I mean, part of it was strictly age related. As you get older—I’m sixty-four—and as you get older, it doesn’t matter how many granola bars you eat; your brain starts to lock up. I had all these long monologues, and I was afraid of blowing my lines. So every single night for one hundred performances, I would do the whole play in the dressing room before I went onstage. I was so terrified.”

On aging: “My parents are dealing with all the things you deal with with age. They’re not thrilled about it, as you can imagine. We—none of us are, I guess. I’m not thrilled with being sixty-four.”

On raising his kids far from Hollywood: “You know, we live on a farm in France. A good portion of my life growing up was on a farm, and as a kid I hated the whole idea of it. But now, for them, it’s like—they’re not on their iPads, you know? They have dinner with grown-ups and have to take their dishes in. They have a much better life. I was worried about raising our kids in L. A., in the culture of Hollywood. I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life. France—they kind of don’t give a sh*t about fame. I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”

On choosing a movie to watch with his wife, Amal: “My wife and I talk about what movies to watch, and we’re in a constant battle because I want it to be some dark documentary or something, and she wants it to be, you know, the next Bridget Jones, or Sex and the City—I’ve seen all of those. By the way, she falls asleep and I end up watching. But it’s always this battle. Recently I said, There aren’t any great comedies out right now, let’s watch some older ones. She goes, What was the biggest comedy when you were young? I said, Well, there was no equal to Animal House. I think it actually made the most money. Huge. She says, Well, let’s watch it. I go, I don’t know if it’s going to hold up. Like, the first scene, a thirteen-year-old girl passes out and the devil pops up on the guy’s shoulder and says, ‘F*ck her brains out!’ And my wife’s looking at me like, Are you kidding me? And I’m like, Oh my God, this is terrible!”

On the legacy he wants for his kids: “I want there to be this thing in their chest that says, ‘Papa.’ You know, ‘This would make Papa proud.’”

[Photo Credit: Christopher Anderson for Esquire Magazine]

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